STUDY: Google underpaid MALE employees by millions in 2018

As Google grapples with multiple lawsuits and a federal investigation into an alleged gender pay gap hurting female employees, an analysis of the company’s compensation shows it’s actually men who are earning less for similar work.

Google conducts an annual study to determine whether the company is underpaying women or minorities, and Lauren Barbato, lead analyst with People Analytics, said this year’s results revealed a “surprising trend that we didn’t expect.”

Algorithm - Market - Rate - Jobs - Location

Using an algorithm that considers market rate for jobs, location, experience and performance, the company identified $9.7 million in adjustments for a total of 10,677 employees, most of them men, The New York Times reports.

The total number of Google employees is unknown, but Google’s parent company, Alphabet, employed nearly 100,000 workers at the end of 2018 and vast majority work for search engine site.

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“Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a higher percentage of the (adjustment) money,” the Times reports. “The exact number of men who got raises is unclear.”

Google’s 2017 pay analysis identified only about $270,000 in adjustments for 228 employees, and Barbato explained why those figures skyrocketed in blog post published Monday.

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“There are a couple of reasons that the pay equity analysis required more adjustments in 2018, compared to 2017,” she wrote. “First, the 2018 analysis flagged one particularly large job code (Level 4 Software Engineer) for adjustments. Within this job code, men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women....